“On Friday, April 16, former President Bill Clinton delivered the keynote address at the Center for American Progress during an event “The Tragedy of Oklahoma City 15 Years Later and the Lessons Learned.” He discussed free speech, tea parties, the founding fathers and representative government. Following is an excerpt from his speech.”

…what we learned from
Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or that we should reduce our
passion for the positions we hold, but that the words we use really do matter because
there are – there’s this vast echo chamber. And they go across space and they
fall on the serious and the delirious, alike; they fall on the connected and
the unhinged, alike. And I am not trying to muzzle anybody.

But one of the things
that the conservatives have always brought to the table in America is a
reminder that no law can replace personal responsibility. And the more power
you have, and the more influence you have, the more responsibility you have.
Look, I’m glad they’re fighting over health care and everything else; let them
have at it.

But I think that all
you have to do is read the paper every day to see how many people there are who
are deeply, deeply troubled. We know, now, that there are people involved in groups
– these “hatriot” groups, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the others –
99 percent of them will never do anything they shouldn’t do. But there are
people who advocate violence and anticipate violence.

One of these guys the
other day said that all politics is just a prelude to the ultimate and inevitable
civil war. You know, I’m a southerner. I know what happened. We were still
paying for (the Civil War) 100 years later when I was a kid growing up, in ways
large and small. It doesn’t take many people to take something like that
seriously…

And I guess that’s
naïve, me being in Washington and all. I still have some memory of it. But I
think that the point I’m trying to make is, I like the debate. This “tea party”
movement can be a healthy thing if they’re making us justify every penny of
taxes we raised and every dollar of public money we spend. And they say they’re
for limited government and a balanced budget; when I left office, we had the
smallest workforce since Eisenhower and we had four surpluses for the first
time in 70 years.

And if the people they
say should be elected had not gotten elected, we would be out of debt in just a
couple of years for the first time since the 1830s. But when you get mad, sometimes
you wind up producing exactly the reverse result of what you say you are for.
Think about your own life; forget about politics. Every time you’ve made an
important decision in some non-political – totally personal – way, when you
were angry or frustrated or afraid, there’s about a 75 percent chance you made
a mistake. Isn’t that right? You know – and the older you get, the more you’ll
see that. …doing things when you are mad is, by and large, a prescription for
error. So the only thing I’m saying is, have at it, go fight, go do whatever
you want. And you don’t have to be nice, and you can be harsh. But you’ve got
to be very careful not to advocate violence or cross the line.

Yes, the Boston Tea
Party involved the seizure of tea in a ship because it was taxation without
representation, because even the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which had been
largely self-governing, had it stripped from them. This is about – this fight
is about taxation by duly, honestly elected representatives that you don’t
happen to agree with, that you can vote out at the next election, and two years
after that, and two years after that, and two years after that. That’s very
different. This whole thing goes right back to our country’s beginnings.

When George Washington
served his two terms and went home to Mount Vernon to

retire and John Adams
became president, he was called out of retirement one time. You know what it
was? He was called out of retirement to command the Armed Forces sent to Pennsylvania
to put down the Whiskey Rebellion, because good Americans who had fought for this
country crossed the line from advocating a different policy and opposing the
current one to taking the law into their own hands in a violent manner.

Once in a while, over
the last 200 years, we’ve crossed the line again. But by and large, that bright
line has held, and that’s why this is the longest-lasting democracy in human
history. That’s why there is so much free speech. That’s why people can
organize their groups. It may seem like fringe groups that advocate whatever
the livin’ Sam Hill they want to advocate. That’s why. But we have to keep the
bright line alive.

~Bill Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States and remains active in the world community. He is the husband of the 67th United States Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

To view the full event video of the American Center for Progress remembrance of the Oklahoma City tragedy, click here.